Searchable database of CY 2012 Texas officials’ financial statements

The state Senate doesn’t like the idea of giving Texans greater access to the personal financial statements of the Lone Star State’s elected officials.

Over the weekend, the upper chamber snuffed out the latest attempt to require the Texas Ethics Commission to post those documents online, along side campaign finance reports, ethics complaints and lobbying disclosures.

So the San Antonio Express-News/Houston Chronicle rounded up the newest filings from the commission and slapped them into a searchable database — available below — which includes recently filed financial statements for top state shot callers such as Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Comptroller Susan Combs.

The latest effort to make personal financial statements available online died when a Senate conference committee stripped a bevy of transparency amendments the House stuffed into an Ethics Commission sunset bill that is now headed to Gov. Rick Perry. It didn’t sit well with some in the upper chamber.

“Frankly that transparency, that availability, that ease of making information available should be something we’re looking to do,” Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, said before the Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve the ethics sunset proposal.

Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, who chaired the conference committee that gutted the online financial statement language, concluded: “My impression is the Senate as a whole doesn’t support this.”

And Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, reiterated security concerns, saying drug cartels or other nefarious groups could use web-accessible documents to plot against lawmakers.

“There are bad people out there who are looking for targets,” Nichols said, noting that he prefers that folks be required to walk into the commission’s downtown Austin office and sign a log sheet to access the documents.

The controversy over the posting online of personal financial statements is nothing new – read stories here and here detailing how contentious a topic it’s become over the last couple of years.

To make the filings available online, we used Socrata — the go-to Web tool for the federal government’s open data initiative — and DocumentCloud, which allows users to drill down and analyze the documents. Note: More than 85 lawmakers filed for extensions. Their new deadline is July 1. We’ll update the database as those filings come in.